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How one of the world’s leading aircraft charter and aviation support companies will use Sage X3 Enterprise Management to drive consolidation and control.

“Sage Line 500 is an older solution that’s served us well for a long time,” Chapman Freeborn’s Chief Financial Officer, Marcus Manning, says. “But it was installed some 15 years ago and is now not suitable and able to work efficiently and effectively.”

Chapman Freeborn is one of the world’s leading aircraft charter and aviation support companies - with an established presence in Europe, North America, Africa, Asia and Australasia. The company employs over 250 staff and serves a wide-ranging client base of multinational corporations, freight forwarders, governments, humanitarian agencies and a host of industries around the globe.

“We wanted a system that reflects where we are now,” Marcus says of the decision to implement Sage X3 Enterprise Management with Datel. “We wanted to move forward with a system more suited to our needs as they are today and for the future.”

For Chapman Freeborn’s finance team, Sage X3 Enterprise Management is the cornerstone of that move. With its multi-currency, multi-language capabilities, the system is specifically designed to help businesses consolidate and control international operations.

Consolidation and control with Sage X3 Enterprise Management

“Consolidation and control were priorities when looking at what a system can do for us,” Marcus says. “Our operation comprises 25 entities, so we needed a system that could streamline the financial management and consolidation of those entities.”

Previously, data from Chapman Freeborn’s international entities was individually downloaded from Sage Line 500 and consolidated in Excel spreadsheets by the group’s finance team. Simplifying that process was one of Marcus’s key requirements.

But Marcus didn’t want a system that simply copied the group’s existing processes, he wanted a system that could guide those processes for the better, “It’ll make us think about what we do, and make sure we keep our financial processes as straight forward as possible.”

Another consideration for Marcus: “We needed a system that could be used effectively by people in different roles and with varying levels of experience. For us, that system was Sage X3 Enterprise Management.”

Datel Product Specialist, Ian Mowbray, says of Sage X3 Enterprise Management: “It’s a solution that can be adapted specifically to the individual user, meaning employees only see what they need to see. It allows the system to be built around the people using it.”

Choosing the right partner and the right system

“We hired an external consultant to review our procedures,” says Marcus. “It brought clarity to the selection process. It helped us establish our requirements and what we wanted to achieve with a new system.”

From the initial steps of that process, Chapman Freeborn selected five prospective systems - each with two potential partners to implement and support those systems. Later, a report was produced to cover the group’s requirements from both a financial and operational perspective.

“That report allowed us to reduce our short list to two resellers and two systems, Sage X3 Enterprise Management and Microsoft Dynamics 365,” says Marcus. This was followed up by system presentations from their respective partners, allowing Marcus to identify their solution.

“Sage X3 Enterprise Management was simply more suited to our needs, it seemed like a more tailored finance system.”

And on why Chapman Freeborn chose Datel to support that finance system: “We wanted to ensure our partner going forward has the resources to support us for years to come.

"The ultimate goal is to keep running a very good, global, secure business with the help of Sage X3 Enterprise Management.”